race

For the Left, public discourse is Lord of the Flies, and victimhood is the conch — that is how they believe we should decide who gets to speak. That’s what the nonsensical business about “intersectionality” is all about. It is at its heart very little more than a reconstitution of old, dumb, primitive, superstitious ideas in the same genus as racism and nationalism, i.e. the belief that certain demographic markers of questionable real-world relevance are supernaturally cementitious determinants of moral meaning. The ugliness and crudity of that view are easy enough to ascertain. There are no political leaders, police officers, journalists, or college professors — only white political leaders, black police officers, gay journalists, disabled college professors, etc. No sensible person believes that we live in a perfectly colorblind society — but it does not follow from that that the most important thing about David Webb is his race. He made the same argument when Areva Martin thought he was white that he would have made if she had known he was black. David Webb is not the variable in that equation.

All true, but I would just add that victimhood is part of a two-step process, like a warranty. It’s only activated when you officially register your product — the product, in these instances, being your political affiliation. Victimhood points without an official certification of progressive bona fides are worthless. The leverage, as all our professional denouncers of white privilege know very well, comes from being in charge of deciding who qualifies as a victim. In what I’m sure is nothing but a remarkable coincidence, that power seems to have accrued entirely to privileged, mostly-white progressives. As I like to say, it’s as if members of the Tsar’s inner circle managed to disguise themselves as Bolsheviks and carry on enjoying the same status and perks they always had. Every so often, as in this latest farcical example, the mask slips, to our amusement. It’s really impressive — they could stop mid-sentence in a performative diatribe against their own privilege to threateningly raise the pimp hand to a “victim” who dares to improvise with the script, all without betraying the slightest hint of cognitive dissonance.

Instead, the Sterling affair has been blown up into a political football to be used in the favourite game of British snobs: giving all common football fans a kicking as racist thugs, sticking the boot into the tabloid press for allegedly stoking prejudice and violence, and demanding stricter policing of both. Behind all that lurks the fashionable belief that working-class Brexit supporters are a bigoted mob.

Cometh the hour, cometh the Spiked article about the snobbish Elites looking down upon the People with fear and contempt. Spiked, the stopped clock of online magazines, has found its twice-daily occasion to be correct. (It’s even more touching that Hume, a torch-carrying Trotskyist, should finally have the chance to be right about something for a change.) For those blissfully unaware, during the Chelsea/Manchester City match a couple weeks ago, the television cameras caught several Chelsea fans shouting abuse at City winger Raheem Sterling as he went behind the goal to retrieve the ball for a corner kick. Thousands of amateur lip-readers quickly formed a consensus that one fan in particular had called Sterling a “fucking black cunt.” (American readers may or may not be aware that the dreaded c-word doesn’t carry the same offensive gendered connotations among our British friends; the outrage was over the modifier.)

This sparked a great National Conversation about the specter of racism in football. The Daily Mail, which never saw a barrel-bottom it wouldn’t lick for clicks, helpfully published the scoundrel’s name, age, and address, with a bonus picture of his house, no doubt to facilitate healing conversations between him and well-wishers in the community, and later gleefully snickered at his “having a moan” over losing both his job and lifelong season tickets. The Guardian, which responds to a hint of social injustice the way a flaccid male member responds to a dose of Viagra, temporarily eased its attempts to proselytize for women’s football in order to testify to the omnipresent menace of racism. Nike, fresh from sponsoring Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling rebellion, quickly bolstered its own woke credibility by producing an ad with Sterling. The media spotlight attracted plenty of other people looking to insert themselves into the story somehow. Inevitably, we were reminded that racism is always and forever everywhere, even, or especially, when it doesn’t seem to be anywhere.

Lost in all the furor and soul-searching was the villain’s insistence that he had called Sterling a cunt of the Manc variety, not the black one. (I assume residents of Manchester don’t yet qualify as a protected species under hate-crime laws.) There seems to be a question-begging circularity to the whole spectacle — how do we know he didn’t, in fact, say “Manc” instead of “black”? The shape of one’s mouth appears plausibly similar in both instances, and unless Britain’s CCTV surveillance has gotten even more quasi-totalitarian in recent years, I’m pretty sure we don’t have conclusive video analysis of how, precisely, the blackguard’s tongue was pressed to his teeth in order to form his consonants. The answer seems to be, well, wouldn’t you expect a racist to feign innocence like that? A cynic might suspect that we’ve invested too much in the story to have it all fizzle out over something as prosaic as the facts, so even if it’s not literally true in this instance, it’s generally true that there are racists out there who would say such things, so we should testify to that higher truth anyway. Besides, who would say that there’s anything wrong with a mass revival denouncing racism? I think you know who.

All in all, there’s no redeeming moral to the story. It’s just a sordid spectacle that makes a misanthrope out of the observer. But yes, when the man’s right, the man’s right. This was largely a solidarity-building exercise for a familiar type of pious liberal for whom the threat of racism would have to be invented if it couldn’t be found already existing. Like war games on the cultural level, it’s an opportunity to rehearse maneuvers and test weaponry. But if there’s one thing British sports journalists love more than sermonizing, it’s reveling in drama surrounding Jose Mourinho, and a merciful God delivered just that opportunity this week by having Mourinho finally get fired as Manchester United manager, thus sparing us from further ritual penance.

This summer, I spent an hour on the phone with Richard Spencer. It was an exchange that left me feeling physically sickened. Toward the end of the interview, he said one thing that I still think about often. He referred to the all-encompassing sense of white power so many liberals now also attribute to whiteness as a profound opportunity. “This is the photographic negative of a white supremacist,” he told me gleefully. “This is why I’m actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip.”

However far-fetched that may sound, what identitarians like Mr. Spencer have grasped, and what ostensibly anti-racist thinkers like Mr. Coates have lost sight of, is the fact that so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes. We will all be doomed to stalk our separate paths.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, in A Time of Gifts, wrote about the thin, porous line between rival fanaticisms after meeting some newly-converted fascists who, just the previous year, had been committed Communists. In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer analyzed at length the psychology of fanaticism, in which the need to believe and belong far outweighed the ideological particulars of this or that doctrine. In this regard, Spencer is far more sophisticated than huckster preachers like Coates and his idiot legions of white progressive devotees, who would be better off, and do far less political damage, by simply going back to church to deal with those unacknowledged salvational needs. Wearing sackcloth and practicing flagellation could easily take the place of identity politics for white people consumed by a sense of sinfulness, and be more easily ignored by the rest of us.

I fear that the truth is Islam has become an untouchable shibboleth for some on the left. What they lacerate in other religions, they refuse to mention in Islam. Sexism, homophobia, the death penalty for apostasy … all of this is to be rationalized if the alternative is Islamophobia. Why, one wonders? Is it because Muslims are a small minority? But the same could be said for Jews. My best guess is simply that, for the far left, anything that is predominantly “of color” is preferable to anything, like Judaism and Christianity, that can usually be described as “white.” That’s how “intersectionality” can be used to defend what would otherwise be indefensible. The preoccupation with race on the far left is now so deep, in other words, it’s becoming simply an inversion of that on the far right.

To be more specific, the proximate preoccupation is with race, but the ultimate preoccupation is with moral authority, as Shelby Steele has helpfully described over the course of several books. As many have noted, the loudest voices denouncing all things “white” typically issue forth from…white people. These White Wokies have no problem with dropping their ostensible racial sensitivity the moment a member of an officially oppressed group dares to disagree with their progressive axioms. It’s about politics and power, just as it’s always been. Race is just an effective tactic for the time being. The only people “of color” who matter are the ones who are content to let the Wokies stay in charge. Cosmetic diversity flowers while ideology marches in lockstep.

In the aggregate logic of progressivism, Team White/Male/Etc. has been running up the score on Team Everybody Else for several hundred years, so the duty of the Enlightened Elect is to encourage and amplify millions of tiny, everyday incidents which can be vaguely construed as The Subaltern scoring one against White/Male/Etc. Supremacy, helping to cancel out the unjust privileges inherited from history. The cumulative effect will be to even the sociopolitical score sometime in the distant future, at which point…the games can re-commence on a level playing field? Just kidding, of course. At that point, behavior will have to be even more tightly supervised and controlled for fear of all our hard work getting undone. Don’t worry, our Wokie overlords will tell us when we reach the promised land and Year Zero begins. Now keep marching.

While that plays out, the least that we white Americans can do is to not ignore race. Some liberals used to pride themselves on saying they didn’t see race, which I always thought was fatuous, more about white self-regard than the reality of American life. No—as I learned at the water park, we have to make ourselves see it and think about it.

As any meditating Buddhist can tell you, obsessing on your thoughts is a recipe for dissatisfaction. “Seeing and thinking about race” has been the default for white progressives for the last half-century at least; if doing so led to anything more productive than compulsively circling around rhetorical and conceptual dead ends, we would surely have seen those results by now. Tomasky relates a simple anecdote of minor social friction which was resolved thanks to people practicing some basic, universally-valid virtues: patience, respect, soft-speaking, and forgiveness. No need at all for a racial healing workshop, yet, predictably, this is what he decides we need. It’s like a passage from one of Shelby Steele’s books come to life.

In 1960, 94 percent of U.S. college students were white. By 1991, that had fallen to 80 percent. Women became a majority among students and also gained more representation within faculties. With these demographic changes came demands that white male professors, administrators, and students listen to points of view they had not had to consider before.

…Today, as the country continues to become less white and women and minorities gain access to more positions of power, maybe it stands to reason that the movement against political correctness has moved from academia into just about every part of public life.

A quick trip to Google will confirm that “divisive” and “polarizing” are terms frequently applied to Donald Trump. But I’m pretty sure everyone actually agrees that he’s an asshole; his fans just happen to love that about him.

This, on the other hand… I mean, JSTOR Daily is basically a Reader’s Digest of academic journals in blog form. Gershon’s brief post about the historical usage of the term “political correctness” is written in anodyne language. And yet, I’d be hard-pressed to find a better example of divisive, polarizing rhetoric.

To summarize her summary in my own words: critics of political correctness are just bitter, resentful white men who feel threatened by the gradual loss of their power and privilege. Yes, it turns out that people who dogmatically insist that race and gender explain everything about culture and politics also insist that it explains any criticism directed toward them. Anyone who argues otherwise becomes ipso facto an angry white male conservative (those who insist, inconveniently, on being critical without being white, male, or conservative are, of course, just fellow travelers suffering from false consciousness, mindless puppets dancing on the strings of their white male controllers). Any self-identified liberal who refuses to toe the party line will be treated as a conservative for all intents and purposes until they wearily give in and accept the label.

It’s hard to imagine a more self-defeating tactic. It’s a perfectly closed circle of logic which guarantees that once all the heretics have been expunged, the true believers will turn on each other in the inevitable purification rituals. Nothing worth keeping will ever grow from this poisoned soil, and yet, too many liberals continue to make excuses for it out of the fear of looking conservative. As Trump would say: Sad!

What does it mean to be a black conservative? If you ask Chidike Okeem, you’ll get an interesting, nuanced response. If you ask Leah Wright Rigueur, well, hey, somebody’s gotta provide the bite-sized news niblets for the busy progressive, I guess. I don’t want to know all the boring details, I just want to know how to signal about it!

Progressive media is best pictured as a bunch of attention-deficient, not-too-bright children batting a balloon around. Soon enough, the balloon pops, and the poor little dimwits stand there looking befuddled, and then they start to cry and wet their pants until someone blows up another balloon and floats it back into the group.

A couple years ago, we snapped a photo of one of the resident SJW writers at the A.V. Club in full tears-and-pissy-pants mode:

Despite consistently negative media attention on the topic (and negative reaction to that negative media attention), apparently two-thirds of Americans still believe that the name “Washington Redskins” isn’t disrespectful toward Native Americans. This stance, most fervently defended by people who own warehouses full of “Washington Redskins” T-shirts…

But for more than a decade, no one has measured what the country’s 5.4 million Native Americans think about the controversy. Their responses to The Post poll were unambiguous: Few objected to the name, and some voiced admiration.

…Even as the name-change movement gained momentum among influential people, The Post’s survey and more than two dozen subsequent interviews make clear that the effort failed to have anywhere near the same impact on Indians.

Across every demographic group, the vast majority of Native Americans say the team’s name does not offend them, including 80 percent who identify as politically liberal, 85 percent of college graduates, 90 percent of those enrolled in a tribe, 90 percent of non-football fans and 91 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 39.

Even 9 in 10 of those who have heard a great deal about the controversy say they are not bothered by the name.

What makes those attitudes more striking: The general public appears to object more strongly to the name than Indians do.

I’m sorry, Ms. Rife, you were saying something hilarious…? You were disregarding the lived experience of People of Color in order to impose your own white intellectual/moral colonial standards, just like your racist ancestors did? Surely, you’re not going to violate one of the bedrock commandments of intersectionality and “appropriate” the native struggle as your own, right? Surely you’re not going to condescendingly “whitesplain” to these benighted savages how they’re too primitive and uneducated to understand what they should be offended by, are you?

(As of this writing, Ms. Rife’s byline at the A.V. Club displays no posts commenting on this latest setback for white SJWs in their mission to take offense on behalf of all those too weak or politically ignorant to take offense for themselves. But we’ll see if that changes soon.)

Those interviewed highlighted again and again other challenges to their communities that they consider much more urgent than an NFL team’s name: substandard schools, substance abuse, unemployment.

These people are pathetic truffle pigs who squeal in delighted outrage whenever they root out another trivial instance of this-ism or that-phobia; once their flickering attention span is distracted by the next pseudo-issue, they’ll go right back to knowing and doing absolutely nothing about the lives of actual, living American Indians.

What is more harmful — and pervasive in these disillusioned last days of the first black presidency — are the ways in which left-leaning discussions now share assumptions with the worst conservative and even white supremacist ideology. Whether put forth by racists or anti-racists, the insistence that, as James Baldwin noted, it is a person’s “categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended,” is oppressive. When genuinely anti-racist views lead us to the same practical conclusions an open bigot would embrace — that black life is miserable compared with white life — we give white people too much credit and strengthen the status quo.

The false choice between acknowledging the repugnant history of racism that informs the present, and the wish to accept the reality that a growing number of black people may nonetheless experience the freedom to define ourselves, is infantilizing. What this current moment of protest and awakening must lead us to, if it is to lead us anywhere, is a dignified means of fully inhabiting our ever more complicated identities.

It’s a strange and ironic double diminishment: first to feel oneself aggrieved, and then to conclude that the best response is to bask in fragility and retreat into an artificially indulgent social context. There is something utterly dehumanizing about being fit to a demographic profile, reduced to the sex or color of a body. While I may not be able to control how I look or how others perceive me, I control absolutely the ways I perceive myself. The idea that minorities need bubbles betrays an internalized sense of inferiority. When we concede public space as inherently hostile instead of deliberately claiming it as our own — as Martin Luther King Jr. and so many others did in the Sixties, as the gay-rights movement did more recently — we perpetuate and reinforce some of the very biases we seek to counteract.

Just as troubling, the growing power and influence of the appeal to vulnerability transforms it from a strictly defensive (if ineffective) tool into an increasingly potent method of intimidation that can silence even meaningful disagreement.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.